Oracle Blog

It's hip to be square!

Sun Grid Engine Easy Install

One of the things people find a little challenging about Grid Engine is installing it the first time. The Install Guide is very detailed, but it's also a little intimidating. It makes the install process sound much more complicated than it really is.

In preparing a give-away CD for SuperComputing 07, I wrote a simple auto-install configuration file that creates a basic single-node grid. Honestly, I don't know why it never occurred to me to do this before. It lowers the bar to getting started with Grid Engine dramatically.

So, now here's the process for installing Grid Engine:

Download the common files bundle and the architecture-specific bundle for your architecture.

That's all there is to it. The cell name will be "default". To start using the grid, just source the settings file (. default/common/settings.sh for sh/ksh/bash or source default/common/settings.csh for csh/tcsh), and run qmon.

The easy_install.conf configuration file will work for both root and non-root users. In other words, it does not try to install the init.d scripts. Feedback is welcome.

Nice work! One suggestion -- the easy install configuration file should probably use the IANA-assigned TCP port numbers for Grid Engine. This would reduce the (admittedly rare) possibility of a conflict.

I decided to go with the non-IANA port numbers because I've heard people complain that the IANA port numbers are in the range that some other daemon (can't remember which one) uses for client ports. I've never heard of a conflict with 576/577, so I figured they were safer.

I've managed to install Grid Engine on a couple Linux machines, but now I want to just add a Windows submit host to this cluster. The Windows install docs are a bit confusing to me. To just set up a Windows machine as a submit-only host, what are the steps? Do I need to install the "Microsoft Services For UNIX" software? The docs talk a lot about the requirements for master and execution hosts, but don't talk much about submit hosts.

Consider editing the "inst_sge" script to add "-x" to the first line - that will turn on an insane amount of debug output and you'll be able to see where things went wrong.

It's also that Dan's easy_install file is specific to an older version of Grid Engine. There have been a number of new releases since '07.

If you still need help I recommend going to http://gridengine.sunsource.net and signing up for the "users@gridengine.sunsource.net" mailing list -- it's by far the best SGE help resource on the internet.

hi its been a long time process to download a sun grid engine through centos..
i really badly need it asap, can i ask for a help what is the proper configuration and the link to downloadd/intall a sun grid engine...